This looks like Aseprite. Aseprite is already open source and you can get it for free, all completely legal. The only caveat is that you need to compile it yourself (which takes 2-5 shell commands). I think this is more than fair, but ripping off Aseprite is not so much. Their license also strictly prohibits that behavior.
> LibreSprite originated as a fork of Aseprite, developed by David Capello. Aseprite used to be distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, but was moved to a proprietary license on August 26th, 2016.
> This fork was made on the last commit covered by the GPL version 2 license, and is now developed independently of Aseprite.
Same old story, too much support requests and bad actors making it hard to make money off opensource.
This is one case where we really should support the original product, you can buy a perpetual licence of a pittance and they just 2 guys chugging along.
LibreSprite has 5000 commits, 30 in the past year whilst ASEPrite has over 10000 at this point.
The person you're replying to was making a clarification on the license, not arguing about the validity of changing the license or charging for it.
Libresprite is an important project because people can fork it and learn from it by extending it, and submit those patches upstream, regardless of how active it is.
I have paid for Aseprite, but on many machines I just install the old GPL version, usually available as a package. It is fine for most tasks, even if the latest version has many improvements.
A fork of the old version to have a slightly better version conveniently available in package repos would be nice. I don't think it has to catch up with Aseprite to be useful.
Aseprite is source available nowadays, not open source. Libresprite was then forked off of the last commit of Aseprite before the license was changed from the GPL.
You might be confusing license with access. The product itself has a proprietary license. Even then, a majority of the libraries they produce are also available under the MIT license.
"open source" has a specific definition[0], which this project does not meet. When people say "open source", that is the definition that they are referencing. It's the reason why there's been endless discussion about "open weights" models not being "open source".
"source available"[1] is a different thing, and you're right that this project is "source available".
Agreed, and it's also available on Steam! I really like the way they handle onion skinning as well, and there's a surprising number of useful plugins (such as tweencel) for it.
The newest news post on this barebones site is from 2023, announcing the MacOS downloads. On the news page there's two other posts; the oldest one is from 2022, and talks about a complete rewrite of the code. I think this fork looks pretty dead.
I mean if you're the kind of person who'd happily skip out on two major versions worth of bugfixes, updates, and new features in favor of the right source-code license, then sure I guess it's a better choice.
I've used libresprite and generally think it's very nice, but I'd really recommend using GIMP or Krita over it for most pixel art, learning those is useful outside of pixel art
If you use the editing capabilities and send in a grid of 32×32 cells on a 1024×1024 image, you can get it to flood-fill in each square, so you end up with properly aligned 32×32 tiles. Then you can squash it via nearest neighbor to pull the lines back out, and reduce the palette using something like unfake.js:
I have really struggled to get nano banana to follow size/proportion ratios for sprite art. any tips? I fed in a bunch of examples first and tried to write a really strict prompt. I wonder if any of the sw being discussed here can be programmatically controlled by claude code or similar to do sprite work
Like the comment above I split sprite sheets into grids with edges for NBP to follow. I have the option to add the canny edge map to the grid to enforce a lot of consistency as well. Then I specifically tailor the prompt to the task.
This is 100% true for artists. But I am not an artist, and I like pixel art stylistically. So when I make sites or games, I need to either: use my bad art, hire someone on fiverr, or use AI.
Haven't used LibreSprite but Aseprite, from which it forked, has been an enormous boon to me, for pixel arting it definitely fits my habits and abilities much better than anything else I tried (GIMP, Krita, GrafX2, actual DPaint, Digipaint...).
Begging open source projects to stop with the libre<name> convention, it's awkward to say, it's cringe and seems to spiritually doom a project to fail.
The "libre" terms originates from the "free software" movement which does not like the term "open source" on philosophical grounds. In English, "free" has multiple meanings, and the romance language-derived "libre" was chosen in the past to distinguish the movement's ideals from the use of "free as in beer".
I just wish more of these projects would be a bit more ambitious and put more focus in their communication on being good at what they do, rather than being free and made by idealists. They're branding themselves in a way that only really appeals to other techy idealists, while accidentally putting off a lot of potential users who are neither technical nor philosophical enough to know or care what a term like libre means. There's a lot of good, free software that is selling itself short by communicating more about being the latter than the former.
I think there's some truth to what you say - at the same time, a lot of successful products have names that basically have no meaning at all, or at least none that's related to what the project actually does ("Windows", "Cursor", "Firefox", etc...)
Of course, a point could be made that any inoffensive but basically fluffy name is still better than a geeky sounding tech babble name...
The most succesful open source projects (firefox, blender, linux, krita,..) do not have libre in their name, the most famous of those who have is probably libreoffice, but it is not exactly loved.
So I totally agree on rather having a name that appeals normal users, than a certain tech bubble who will rather use the terminal wherever they can anyway ..
One example that really sticks in my mind was "Libreboot". Yes, it's supposed to represent a free BIOS/booting system. But it also sounds like the name of a library dedicated to rebooting your computer.
I speak two languages (English and Russian) and have never found their name to be awkward. This is the first time, actually, that I've seen somebody say they don't like their name.
Curious on what languages have a hard time saying Libre.
Every latin-derived language (which are most of the western languages) can pronounce it naturally, and even English speakers can approximate it well enough to be understood (even though they're incapable of pronouncing the non-retroflex `r`).
> LibreSprite originated as a fork of Aseprite, developed by David Capello. Aseprite used to be distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, but was moved to a proprietary license on August 26th, 2016.
> This fork was made on the last commit covered by the GPL version 2 license, and is now developed independently of Aseprite.
Also I am not really sure if you can convince me that this is a open source license: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/blob/main/EULA.txt
Not that it is a unreasonable license, but it is not open source.
[0]: https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite?tab=readme-ov-fil...
This is one case where we really should support the original product, you can buy a perpetual licence of a pittance and they just 2 guys chugging along.
LibreSprite has 5000 commits, 30 in the past year whilst ASEPrite has over 10000 at this point.
Libresprite is an important project because people can fork it and learn from it by extending it, and submit those patches upstream, regardless of how active it is.
A fork of the old version to have a slightly better version conveniently available in package repos would be nice. I don't think it has to catch up with Aseprite to be useful.
2. It’s okay for two projects to do the same thing, even if you personally prefer one over the other.
You might be confusing license with access. The product itself has a proprietary license. Even then, a majority of the libraries they produce are also available under the MIT license.
"source available"[1] is a different thing, and you're right that this project is "source available".
[0]: https://opensource.org/osd
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
Their EULA forbids distributing the software, hence not open source.
https://www.stef.be/dpaint/
If you're looking for pixel-art sprites, check out 8bitsmith.com. Or you can just ask Nano-Banana for sprite sheets and it does a pretty good job!
I actually did some testing of spritesheeting with Nano Banana Pro a while back:
https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-sprites
If you use the editing capabilities and send in a grid of 32×32 cells on a 1024×1024 image, you can get it to flood-fill in each square, so you end up with properly aligned 32×32 tiles. Then you can squash it via nearest neighbor to pull the lines back out, and reduce the palette using something like unfake.js:
https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js
But even still it has issues sometimes.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
Of course, a point could be made that any inoffensive but basically fluffy name is still better than a geeky sounding tech babble name...
So I totally agree on rather having a name that appeals normal users, than a certain tech bubble who will rather use the terminal wherever they can anyway ..
What other major software has that?
Linux?
EDIT: Also Qt, MySQL, SQLite, GIMP (rather unnecessarily), ...
Ref: https://youtu.be/YHBve8v13VY?si=Bql2vH6C4goZN_kX
From your comment somehow I was expecting something a bit more exotic
Every latin-derived language (which are most of the western languages) can pronounce it naturally, and even English speakers can approximate it well enough to be understood (even though they're incapable of pronouncing the non-retroflex `r`).
I'd go for "LEE-broffis" which I don't think is all that hideously far away?
https://github.com/Orama-Interactive/Pixelorama
https://github.com/piskelapp/piskel
They're similar pixel art editor programs.
http://grafx2.chez.com/
https://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/
I guess it's a bit old but it works reasonably well, and supports a lot of different file formats which is occasionally useful.
Libresprite (since aseprite went evil) has been the only editor I can use for over a decade, glad there are others now.